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Thursday, 13 December 2018

Dark Film Review: Nerve

Dark Film Review: Nerve

Review by Casey
Douglass

Nerve is one of
those films that has been sitting on my Freeview recorder for a
little while now. It sounded interesting, but I was just a bit “meh”
about actually watching it. Luckily, the other day, I did finally
decide to give it a chance, and I’m happy to report that I liked it
far more than I expected to.

The Nerve of the title
is an online dare game, one in which the participants have to
complete dares for money, unless they “bail” or “fail”. When
the participant signs up to be a Player (you can also be a Watcher),
the Nerve platform harvests all of the online information about you
that it can, which may or may not be used for your dares. If you are
afraid of spiders, as an example, and you’ve posted about it, well,
expect creepy goodness crawling up your arm at some point. Some dares
also seem to be crowd-sourced, with people voting on what someone
needs to do. There are also various rules, like it has to be filmed
on the player’s own phone to count. Another rule is to keep Nerve
secret, because “snitches get stitches”.

Vee (Emma Roberts) is a
shy, geeky highschooler who lacks the confidence to make any of the
important decisions in her life. Her friend Sydney (Emily Meade),
tells her about Nerve and wants her to be one of her Watchers, as the
more Watchers someone has, the higher up the ranking table they get.
After Vee witnesses Sydney doing her dare, flashing her naked
backside as a cheerleader at a football game, the pair have a falling
out when Syndey embarrasses Vee with the guy she fancies. So, like
any normal person, Vee rides home on her bicycle and decides to opt
into a sketchy online dare platform. As you do. Completing her first
dare brings her into contact with Ian (Dave Franco), and that’s
contact beyond a mere “Howdi!” Their paths are then entwined for
the rest of the film, as they both work together to complete the
various tasks set them by Nerve.

Nerve is a slick
film. From the computer graphics of watching people through see-thru
mobiles and computers, to the various message exchanges and video
recording that goes on, it all has a nice polished, technological
aesthetic. Even Ian’s motorbike and various stretches of street
lighting glow in neon colours. It just made the whole film quite
“punchy” in the visual sense, and I enjoyed this. I didn’t
really enjoy the soundtrack though, and in places I found it quite
annoying, but that’s just due to the music not being to my taste.

The narrative flows
along nicely, although there were a few scenes in which I questioned
how much Vee could change in such a short period of time. I wouldn’t
say that it wasn’t feasible, but certain things felt a bit overly
contrived, the breakups and make-ups sometimes occurring in such a
frictionless way, it just didn't feel real. I did like the interplay
between Vee and Ian though, and the way that the dares tended to
escalate. Many of the dares featured public embarrassment, and I
could feel myself cringing as the characters had to navigate their
way through them. The ending was relatively satisfying too, although
for a film called Nerve,
it felt like it played it a bit too safe for my liking.

In a way, the true star
of the film for me was Nerve, the platform. A system that can scrape
personal information from your social media profiles and other online
activity, crunch it all and then turn it into a twisted dare-based
challenge system? How creepy and brilliant at the same time. The
topic of fear and daring to do stuff is also something almost anyone
will connect with, the anxiety that pushing your comfort zone can
bring, and the everyday feelings of “Oh, if I’d just taken that
chance to say hello to that person, but I can’t”. Add people
filming you as you try to do that very thing, and a whole new level
of stress gets added to things. As I said, you’ll probably cringe
along to a good few of the dares, and that’s not even mentioning
the ones that put people in physical danger.

Nerve was a film
that I really enjoyed, and one that fits into stuff that I find
really interesting. It aligns with some of the other books and films
that I’ve enjoyed, such as The Diceman by Luke Rhinehart,
which is a guy basically “self-daring” with dice, and even
non-fiction stuff like Rejection Proofby Jia Jiang, a book
written by someone who filmed himself getting rejected so that he
could challenge himself to overcome it. Add in the technology aspect
to Nerve, and I found it to be quite gripping.